Showgirls - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Showgirls or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Showgirls

[gabriel]

Joe Eszterhas came up with the idea for this script while on vacation at his home in Maui, Hawaii. Based on the idea he scribbled on a napkin, he was advanced $2 million to write the script and picked up an additional $1.7 million when the studio produced it into a film.

[aaron]

Kyle MacLachlan denied rumours that he walked out of the premiere - "I sat there and suffered for the whole two hours".

[michele]

In the original screenplay, Molly was described as a chubby Caucasian girl.

[caroline]

In a (2015) sketch comedy act on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (2014), they reunited the Saved by the Bell (1989) cast. During the sketch, a reference is made towards Jessie's character about one day being a stripper. This is clearly a joke made on the fact that after the series, Elizabeth Berkley would go on to do this film.

[eli]

Elizabeth Berkley arrived on Paul Verhoeven's radar after the actress impressed producer Charles Evans during an audition held in his hotel room, per The Hollywood Reporter.

[michele]

The "Los Angeles" freeway sign at the end of the movie, was a hint at a sequel that Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas were already planning for with the working title "Bimbos: Nomi Does Hollywood", but was abandoned when this movie debuted. The sequel was to have Nomi going to Hollywood and taking on the movie business, an area that Eszterhas knew even more juicy stories about.

[steve]

Kyle MacLachlan later recalled seeing the film for the first time at the premiere:"I was absolutely gobsmacked. I said, "This is horrible. Horrible!" And it's a very slow, sinking feeling when you're watching the movie, and the first scene comes out, and you're like, "Oh, that's a really bad scene." But you say, "Well, that's okay, the next one'll be better." And you somehow try to convince yourself that it's going to get better... and it just gets worse. And I was like, "Wow. That was crazy." I mean, I really didn't see that coming. So at that point, I distanced myself from the movie. Now, of course, it has a whole other life as a sort of inadvertent... satire. No, "satire" isn't the right word. But it's inadvertently funny. So it's found its place. It provides entertainment, though not in the way I think it was originally intended. It was just... maybe the wrong material with the wrong director and the wrong cast".

[eli]

Kyle MacLachlan used a body double.

[melinda]

Pamela Anderson, Angelina Jolie, Vanessa Marcil, Denise Richards and Charlize Theron auditioned for the role of Nomi Malone. Richards would be cast in Paul Verhoeven's next film, Starship Troopers (1997).

[bernice]

The rape scene, and the subsequent refusal of the Las Vegas big shots to punish those responsible, is based on a real incident that Joe Eszterhas learned of while he worked for Rolling Stone magazine.

[oscar]

In a 2013 interview, Paul Verhoeven explained his motives for doing the movie. He did not like Joe Eszterhas's initial script, and passed on the project in favor of doing "Crusade", based on a screenplay by Walon Green and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. However, that project fell through when Carolco Pictures could not afford to finance both "Crusade" and Cutthroat Island (1995). Since $10 million had already been spent on "Crusade", and Eszterhas already received $4 million for his Showgirls screenplay, Verhoeven felt morally obligated to do Showgirls as a personal favor to Mario Kassar to save Carolco from bankruptcy. Eszterhas' screenplay was extensively re-written with All About Eve (1950) as the main source of inspiration. Verhoeven intended it to be an over-the-top morality tale, populated with only amoral characters (except for the character of Molly (Gina Ravera), with Las Vegas as a metaphor for hypocrisy and extortion. However, the satirical intentions were not picked up by the critics, who regarded the movie as a simplistic portrayal of American culture, and the box office failure of both this movie and 'Cutthroat Island' made the bankruptcy of Carolco inevitable.